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sean dunne

Sean Dunne, the creative genius behind short documentary films The Archive,American Juggalo, and The Bowler, is putting the finishing touches on his first feature film, Oxyana, about a small coal mining town in West Virginia that has been completely overtaken by Oxycontin. According to Dunne, "It's really f**king eye opening":

Oceana, West Virginia, sits squarely in one of God's blind spots. It's one of the old coal mining communities that feeds the nations insatiable appetite for energy. Set in the middle of unbelievable natural beauty, a beauty that in the last number of years, has been marred by the Appalachian scourge of Oxycontin. Life persists, but it's a living that few Americans could explain or even believe; closer in kind to the world of a medieval plague. Men and women die epidemically.
The addicts— who are the vast majority, and all nice enough people— sell, scramble, and steal in an economy of nigh-endtimes desperation. Worn down and out by the pills, the mines, or the indignity of both, everyone is easily twice their own age, and unable to imagine an existence outside of coal, subsidies, and prescription narcotics. Things could hardly get darker— or more fucked and implausible— than in this place called Oceana.